The work proposed here is devoted to the prediction and the characterization of the mechanical behavior of interlock woven composite structures. We propose an approach to characterize the mechanical properties of interlock woven composite structures and particularly to solve the problems associated with the creation of these complex geometries and their discretization into a conform mesh. One of the difficulties of this meso-macro approach is to reproduce faithfully the geometry of these architectures with complex shapes and to obtain a Representative Volume Element (RVE). Once this complex step is achieved, the mechanical properties of the composite can be thereafter obtained by homogenization from a finite element analysis. The difficulties to generate a RVE of such structures are well known: interpenetration and contacts between yarns, meshing of thin resin layers at interfaces, determination of the orientation of the fibers at all points of the structure. We propose an approach which consists of creating a geometric model of the yarns limiting or controlling the intersections and the contacts, defining a periodic RVE, meshing this RVE by tetrahedral with compatible meshes at the interfaces. Once the model is meshed and the symmetry conditions are defined, the properties are obtained by homogenization. The finite element calculations are performed on the ABAQUS software. Complex weaves can be automatically processed with this technique. The results are compared whit other modeling from the literature and with experimental data.
